Business for Punks: Break All the Rules – the BrewDog Way

BrewDog's co-founder James Watt offers a business bible for a new generation. It's anarchic. It's irreverent. It's passionate. It's BrewDog.

Don't waste your time on bullshit business plans. Forget sales. Ignore advice. Put everything on the line for what you believe in.

These mantras have turned BrewDog into one of the world's fastest-growing drinks brands, famous for beers, bars and crowdfunding.

Founded by a pair of young Scots with a passion for great beer, BrewDog has catalysed the craft beer revolution, rewritten the record books and inadvertently forged a whole new approach to business.

In BUSINESS FOR PUNKS, BrewDog co-founder James Watt bottles the essence of this success. From finances ('chase down every cent, pimp every pound') to marketing ('lead with the crusade, not the product') this is an anarchic, indispensable guide to thriving on your own terms.

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Rezension bezieht sich auf: Business for Punks: Break All the Rules – the BrewDog Way (Gebundene Ausgabe)

Punk (or punk rock as it was called in the early days) was a reaction towards a music industry and music which through the years (presumably since beat days) had taken more to glam and glitter and had become perfunctory. Think of punk as a reaction towards T.Rex, Bowie with make-up and stage clothes, and psychedelic arty-farty stuff. Three cords are enough and bringing the means of production under the control of the musician was the creed of Punks. (OK, admittedly the old school stuff and the industry came back in through the backdoor, and a character such as Malcolm McLaren and his Sex Pistols with hindsight were charlatans, but the majority of musicians, punks and punkettes believed in something that had teeth and claws and was anti-(music)-establishment.) What does that have to do with that book?

There are structural equivalents when you look at business. There is a whole industry out there serving the real industry i.e. entrepreneurs, real entrepreneurs which carries a trunkful of instruments and conventional wisdom around. That is the establishment. Want to be like them? Then take an MBA and join the ranks of the global fortune companies. And start singing a song of mendacity. Business Planning, Forecasting, marketing wisdom and all of the stuff which sometimes barely cover that the underlying idea of the product is zilch, non-existent.

This book is about doing business right, with conviction, with balls, with a solid attitude that mistrusts conventional wisdom (make a plan, pimp your sales if customers do not seem to want to buy) and mistrusts 'merchants of meaning and beautiful words' i.e. advisors, consultants, bankers.

Of course it is naive to assume that you can stay cool and honest and always be yourself (as did punk groups when they were signed by the majors). But what makes the difference is the attitude, in the words of the author "cynical optimism".